EXHIBITIONS

“Accidentally on Purpose” at Quad, Derby

“Accidentally on Purpose” is an exhibition, online project, series of soundtracks and closing event curated by Candice Jacobs and Fay Nicolson and produced in collaboration with QUAD.

The project explores the relationship between success and failure using common place materials, everyday situations and repetitious processes as a point of departure. Art works grapple with their materiality, context or the processes that bring them into being; challenging the frameworks we use to judge success or validate an aesthetic decision, sincere message, or logical action. Objects, images and words test their own limits, and in doing so, re-negotiate and redefine their success or failure, intention or meaning.

The exhibition takes its title from an American Sitcom. Situated in the banality of the everyday, its characters strive to make the best of an unfortunate situation; repetitively re-negotiating the uncertainty of their lives. In a similar vein, after being shown on television every week for 18 weeks, the sitcom proved unsuccessful and was axed.

Above – Installation shot with works (left to right): Untitled by Edit Oderbolz, 2012; Curtains (I) (There have been many occasions when I have recorded something and I have come into the studio at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning and really been in sixteen, not just two different minds, but sixteen different minds as to how it should go…), Curtains (II) (…and this sense of option is really quite a marvellous luxury. It’s a luxury that you cannot permit yourself in the concert hall, you simply cannot, you would be dead if you walked on stage not being quite certain…), Curtains (III) (…But in fact what happens is that by one o’clock in the afternoon having given it three hours of work I may not have come to any definitive conclusions, but I will finally have selected one of these options and made it my priority, and out of this created a viable performance.) Glenn Gould, Becky Beasley, 2009; and Zaprzeczenie (Negation) by Ryszard Wasko,1973. Photograph: Fay Nicolson & Candice Jacobs.

Installation shot with works (left to right): Curtains (I) (There have been many occasions when I have recorded something and I have come into the studio at 10 o’clock on a Monday morning and really been in sixteen, not just two different minds, but sixteen different minds as to how it should go…) by Becky Beasley, 2009; Untitled by Edit Oderbolz, 2012; and Your Higher Plane Awaits by Clunie Reid, 2010. Photograph: Chris Seddon.